Fort Worth Daycare Injury Lawyers
When a facility fails your child, we hold them accountable. No fee unless we win.
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2026
Daycare Injuries in Fort Worth
Every morning, tens of thousands of Fort Worth parents drop their children off at daycare centers, preschools, and home-based childcare facilities, trusting that the people they have entrusted with their child's care will keep that child safe. This is one of the most profound acts of trust a parent can extend to a stranger — and when that trust is violated, the consequences can be devastating and long-lasting. Texas is home to thousands of licensed childcare facilities, and the Fort Worth–Arlington metro area alone has hundreds of daycare centers ranging from large commercial chains to small family-run operations.
When a child is injured at a daycare facility due to inadequate supervision, unsafe premises, negligent hiring, or outright abuse, the law provides a path to accountability. Texas negligence law imposes a duty of reasonable care on childcare providers — and that duty is elevated precisely because the people in their care are young, vulnerable, and entirely dependent on adults for their safety. When a facility fails to meet that duty and a child is harmed as a result, the facility and its owners can be held legally and financially responsible.
Patterson Law Group represents families whose children have been hurt at Fort Worth-area daycare facilities. We understand how emotionally overwhelming it is to learn that your child was injured while in someone else's care, and we approach these cases with both compassion and relentless advocacy. If your child was hurt at a daycare, we want to hear from you — our consultation is free, and we never charge a fee unless we recover compensation for your family.
How Daycare Injuries Happen
The single most common cause of daycare injuries is inadequate supervision. Children — particularly infants and toddlers — require close, constant monitoring. When a facility is understaffed, when caregivers are distracted, or when staff-to-child ratios are violated, children can be harmed in seconds. A toddler can fall from a changing table, a preschooler can wander into a hazardous area, or an infant can be placed in an unsafe sleep position — all because no adult was watching closely enough. These incidents are not accidents in the true sense of the word; they are the foreseeable consequence of a facility cutting corners on supervision.
Playground equipment injuries are another frequent source of daycare harm. Poorly maintained equipment — cracked plastic, splintered wood, broken hardware, inadequate fall-zone surfaces — poses obvious dangers to children who cannot assess risk for themselves. Falls from climbing structures, entrapment injuries from gaps and protrusions, and strangulation hazards from drawstring clothing caught on equipment are all documented causes of serious injury in childcare settings. Facilities have a duty to regularly inspect and maintain their equipment and to immediately remove or repair anything that poses a danger.
Other serious daycare injury scenarios include choking incidents resulting from age-inappropriate food or small objects left within a child's reach; burn injuries from hot beverages, food, or uncovered outlets; drowning and near-drowning in water play areas, splash pads, or even mop buckets; and injuries caused by other children when staff failed to prevent or intervene in bullying or physical altercations. Transportation accidents on daycare vans or buses — due to improper car seat use, unsecured children, or negligent driving — also represent a significant category of preventable harm. And in the most serious cases, children suffer physical or sexual abuse at the hands of caregivers.
Texas Regulations for Childcare Facilities
In Texas, licensed childcare facilities are regulated by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which sets minimum standards for staffing, safety, physical environment, and operational practices. These regulations are not aspirational guidelines — they are binding legal requirements, and violations of HHSC standards can serve as powerful evidence of negligence in a civil lawsuit. Understanding the regulatory framework is one of the first things our attorneys do when evaluating a daycare injury case.
HHSC sets minimum caregiver-to-child ratios that vary by the age of the children being served. For infants under 18 months, the required ratio is one caregiver for every four children. For toddlers aged 18 to 35 months, the ratio is 1:9. For three-year-olds, it is 1:11. For four-year-olds, 1:15. These ratios represent the absolute minimum — not a gold standard — and a facility that routinely operates at exactly the minimum is taking on significant risk. When staffing falls below even these minimums, as it often does when facilities fail to account for staff breaks, absences, or turnover, the danger to children increases substantially.
HHSC also requires that daycare facilities conduct criminal background checks and child abuse registry checks on all employees and volunteers before they are permitted to work with children. Facilities must maintain records of these checks and must immediately report any abuse or neglect suspected to occur on the premises. HHSC conducts both announced and unannounced inspections, and inspection reports — which document any violations found — are public record. In our experience, facilities with histories of HHSC violations are more likely to be involved in serious injury incidents, and those prior violations can be introduced as evidence of a pattern of negligence in litigation.
Child Abuse at Daycare Facilities
No daycare injury scenario is more devastating than the discovery that a child has been physically or sexually abused by a caregiver. When this occurs, the facility itself may bear significant civil liability — not just the individual abuser. The legal theories of negligent hiring, negligent supervision, and negligent retention all allow injured children and their families to hold the daycare organization accountable for placing a dangerous person in a position of trust with children.
Negligent hiring occurs when a facility hires someone without conducting adequate background checks, when the background check reveals a red flag that should have disqualified the applicant, or when warning signs during the interview process were ignored. Negligent supervision occurs when a facility fails to properly oversee employees while they are working with children — for example, by allowing staff to be alone with children in unsupervised areas without a second adult present. Negligent retention occurs when a facility continues to employ someone after receiving complaints or observing behavior that should have put management on notice that the employee posed a risk to children.
Texas law designates daycare employees as mandatory reporters of suspected child abuse or neglect under the Texas Family Code. If a facility employee witnesses or has reason to suspect abuse and fails to report it to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), that failure is itself a crime — and in a civil case, it is strong evidence of institutional complicity in the harm done to your child. If a facility management covered up complaints or discouraged reporting to protect its reputation, those facts can support claims for punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages.
Proving Your Daycare Negligence Case
Texas premises liability and negligence law provide the foundation for daycare injury claims. To establish negligence, we must prove that the facility owed your child a duty of care (established simply by the fact that the facility agreed to care for your child), that it breached that duty by failing to meet the standard of reasonable care, that the breach caused your child's injury, and that your child suffered actual harm as a result. While this framework is familiar in general personal injury law, applying it to a daycare setting requires evidence that many families do not know how to obtain on their own.
HHSC inspection records are often the most valuable starting point. These public records document every violation found during inspections — staffing shortfalls, safety hazards, failure to conduct background checks, missing training certifications, and more. Prior violations of the same type that caused your child's injury are extremely valuable in establishing that the facility knew about the problem and failed to fix it. We obtain these records at the outset of every daycare injury case we take.
Surveillance footage is frequently available inside and around daycare facilities and can directly show what happened to your child. However, most facilities overwrite their footage on a rolling 30-day or shorter cycle. As soon as you contact us, we send a formal preservation demand to the facility requiring them to retain all footage and other evidence. Employee training records, incident reports, staffing schedules, background check files, and communications between management staff about prior complaints or incidents are all potentially relevant and can be obtained through the discovery process if the facility does not voluntarily provide them. Statements from other parents and staff who witnessed the facility's operations can also be powerful evidence of systemic problems.
Statute of Limitations for Child Injury Claims in Texas
In Texas, the standard statute of limitations for personal injury claims is two years from the date of the injury, as set forth in Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §16.003. Miss this deadline and your claim is permanently barred, regardless of how strong your case might otherwise be. For this reason, it is always advisable to consult with an attorney as soon as possible after a daycare injury rather than waiting to "see how things go."
There is, however, an important exception for claims involving injured minors. Under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §16.001, the statute of limitations is tolled — legally paused — for minors until they reach the age of 18. This means that a child injured at a daycare at age three technically has until age 20 to file a lawsuit on their own behalf. However, this tolling provision is frequently misunderstood, and acting on the assumption that you have years to spare is a serious mistake. Evidence disappears. Surveillance footage is deleted. Witnesses move away and their memories fade. Employees leave the facility and become difficult to locate. Prior incident reports are lost or destroyed. The facility may close, restructure, or be sold to new ownership. The practical reality is that the best cases are built immediately, while the evidence is fresh and witnesses are accessible.
Additionally, if the claim involves a government-operated or government-funded childcare facility, special notice requirements under the Texas Tort Claims Act may apply, with notice deadlines as short as six months. This is another reason why early consultation with an attorney is essential — not months later, not when the two-year deadline is approaching, but as soon as you discover your child was injured and believe a facility's negligence may have played a role.
Damages in Daycare Injury Cases
When a child is injured due to a daycare facility's negligence, Texas law allows recovery of a broad range of economic and non-economic damages. Economic damages include all medical bills — emergency care, hospitalization, surgery, physical therapy, and any future medical treatment necessitated by the injury. For serious injuries involving lasting physical or psychological harm, future medical costs can be substantial and must be documented through expert testimony from treating physicians and medical economists.
Non-economic damages in child injury cases are particularly significant. A child who suffers a severe burn, a traumatic brain injury, a broken bone resulting in a visible scar, or lasting psychological trauma from abuse has suffered harms that go far beyond medical bills. Pain and suffering, emotional distress, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life are all compensable under Texas law. In abuse cases where the facility's conduct was particularly egregious — for example, where management knew about an abuser and chose to do nothing — punitive damages may also be available to punish the wrongdoer and deter future misconduct.
In the tragic circumstance where a child dies as a result of a daycare injury or abuse, Texas Chapter 71 (the Wrongful Death Act) and the Survival Statute allow surviving parents and family members to recover damages for their own grief, mental anguish, and loss of companionship, as well as damages for the child's pain and suffering and medical expenses incurred before death. These cases are among the most painful our attorneys handle, and we approach them with the seriousness and compassion they demand.
Why Patterson Law Group for Daycare Injury Cases
Daycare injury cases require more than legal skill — they require an investigative mindset, the willingness to dig through regulatory records, and the sensitivity to work with families during what is often the most frightening and heartbreaking experience of their lives. At Patterson Law Group, we have been fighting for injured Texans and their families for over 30 years. We understand that when a parent comes to us after their child has been hurt, they need answers, they need action, and they need to know that someone is truly in their corner.
We immediately begin building the evidentiary record — obtaining HHSC inspection histories, sending preservation demands for surveillance footage and employee files, locating and interviewing witnesses, and working with medical and psychological experts to fully document your child's injuries and their long-term effects. We do not accept lowball settlements from insurance companies protecting negligent daycare operators, and we are fully prepared to take these cases to trial when that is what it takes to achieve justice.
There is no fee unless we win. Your initial consultation is completely free and confidential. If your child was injured at a Fort Worth daycare, preschool, or childcare facility, please call us at (817) 784-2000 or reach out online any time. The sooner you contact us, the sooner we can begin preserving the evidence your family needs.
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